The Torch-Bearer

GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass That held their glories moulders in its turn. Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed, And ever on the palimpsest of earth Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ. But one thing makes the years its pedestal, Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps A skyward wing above its epitaph-- The will of man willing immortal things.

The ages are but baubles hung upon The thread of some strong lives--and one slight wrist May lift a century above the dust; For Time, The Sisyphean load of little lives, Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great. But who are these that, linking hand in hand, Transmit across the twilight waste of years The flying brightness of a kindled hour? Not always, nor alone, the lives that search How they may snatch a glory out of heaven Or add a height to Babel; oftener they That in the still fulfilment of each day's Pacific order hold great deeds in leash, That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks Hide the attempered blade of high emprise, And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the call Of one rare moment all the daily store Of joy distilled from the acquitted task, And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks The pondered action passed into the blood; So swift to harden purpose into deed That, with the wind of ruin in his hair, Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh, And at one stroke he lived the whole of life, Poured all in one libation to the truth, A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow On deserts of the soul long beaten down By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring In manifold upheaval to the sun.

Call here no high artificer to raise His wordy monument--such lives as these Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp An empty vesture. Let resounding lives Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults And make the grave their spokesman--such as he Are as the hidden streams that, underground, Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine, Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars The scent of freedom; or a light that burns Immutably across the shaken seas, Forevermore by nameless hands renewed, Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.

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